Thursday, March 6, 2014

President’s Budget: Tiny Steps to Deinarcerate and Billions for Prisons and Police

By Marc Schindler

President Obama and
his administration released their Fiscal Year
2015 (FY15) budget plan on March 4. For folks
favoring a broader response to meeting public safety and youth development
goals, the budget is a mixed bag with the bulk of the Justice Department’s $27
billion being spent on ways to incarcerate and arrest more people. These
enormous investments in continuing to lock up more and more people contrasts
with the President’s statements at the launch last week of his My Brother’s Keeper initiative: a promising effort intended to create opportunities for boys and
young men of color, including approaches to keep them out of the justice
system.

The budget takes modest steps to restore some youth development funds deleted
from the president’s 2014 budget proposal by the last Congress.According to the Act for JJ, a campaign that JPI is part of advocating for the
reauthorization of a strengthened Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention
Act (JJDPA), the budget restores the Juvenile Accountability Block Grants
program funding, and continues some of the new monies recommended to help
address and eliminate community violence.

This is an important
step, but a small step. The president’s youth development budget falls short of
the funds advocated for by Act for JJ, including the $20
million originally requested by the president to support state deincarceration
efforts, and $30 million more needed for juvenile justice efforts overall. These
funds are also dwarfed by other budget proposals in the justice realm.

As Ted Gest notes in The Crime
Report,
of the $27 billion proposed for Justice, the largest line items are $9 billion
for the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s various efforts, and $8.4 billion for
the Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Most of the BOP funds are spent on a growing
federal prison population, largely driven by the incarceration of individuals
for drug offenses.

The president’s
proposed budget also boosts funding for the Community Oriented Policing (COPS)
program, up from $180 million in FY 2014 to $222 million in FY 2015—something
that expands local capacity to arrest more individuals, and subsidizes local
government to employ police when cities or counties could be right-sizing.

In contrast to the
billions being spent to imprison and arrest more people, the federal investment
in re-entry and other ways to meet public safety needs are failing to keep
pace.The president’s budget includes a
modest increase in the Second Chance Act (from $68 million to $115 million), a
funding stream that supports reentry efforts in the states.

All eyes are on the
$414 federal residential drug abuse program, and whether its implementation
will create opportunities for states to treat drug-involved individuals outside
of a correctional setting.

In short, a little
additional money to help states ween themselves off youth incarceration is a
big deal for a country that spends $80 billion on prisons and jails -- and can
make a difference. But there is plenty more work to be done to press elected
officials to make smarter budget choices to reduce incarceration, and invest in
effective ways to prevent crime.